Could the rocks floating through space one day help humanity survive on another world? Scientists are beginning to explore whether asteroids could provide the metals and fuel needed to make Mars habitable.
I watched Armageddon again fairly recently with Bruce Willis, oil drillers in space, and an asteroid the size of Texas bearing down on Earth. Buried beneath the Hollywood chaos is a genuinely interesting question: what exactly could we do with an asteroid if we got our hands on one? As it turns out, the answer has nothing to do with blowing it up, sorry Bruce, but everything to do with building a new world.
Building a colony on Mars is not just an engineering problem; it’s a logistics one too. The logistics, unglamorous as it sounds, may ultimately determine whether humanity becomes a multi-planetary species or stays firmly rooted on Earth.
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